Colourful protests organised by trades unions and left-wing parties across Asia shared the theme of better pay and conditions, and denunciations of government policy, as living costs increase in fast-growing economies.

Marchers in Europe used May 1, a national holiday in more than 80 countries around the world, to protest against government-imposed austerity measures.

Thousands of May Day protesters in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan demanded raises in pay that they say has not kept up with rising consumer prices, while also calling for lower school fees and expressing a variety of other grievances.

Indonesian workers held Asia’s biggest rally, watched warily by a heavy police and army presence.

Carrying banners saying “raise our salaries” and “stop outsourcing contracts”, more than 9,000 workers gathered at Jakarta’s main roundabout before marching to the state palace.

About 16,000 police and soldiers were deployed to guard the protest, Rikwanto, Jakarta police spokesman, said.

One day in the play yard, Tanner encountered Blair, a street dog brought in after she was shot (thankfully, she has since convalesced). Like something out of a storybook, the two dogs struck up a friendship in which Blair acts as a seeing eye dog and companion for Tanner, even leading him by a leash. Since pairing off, Tanner has completely stopped having seizures and Blair, who was suffering from post-traumatic stress that caused her to be timid and nervous, has grown remarkably more confident and social with humans and dogs alike.

It is the realization that, at one time, this was only one world, and that it belonged to our people. That having been said, today we find ourselves in a complicated position. The full cost of mainstream assimilation for the American Indian has yet to be determined. Today, five hundred years later, we are still in the process of assessing what has been lost.

Collectively, we have paid a very dear price. Ours has been a culture that has relied on the oral transmission of our history and values. Our languages and have suffered tremendously, and therefore our cultures have suffered tremendously, and we find ourselves struggling to hold on to as much of both of them as possible. Obviously, we have lost almost all of our lands—what is less obvious is the lingering cost of the occupation and holocaust we have experienced remain to this very day. These haunt us in a more subtle, even subliminal, way.

Yet we have evolved and are dealing with the hand we have been dealt, so to speak. We are and remain a viable, vibrant and proud people, with the same dreams and aspirations as anyone else. Today, having retained our values and beliefs, we are doctors, lawyers and every other profession that is found in mainstream society, and we are moving ahead in many constructive ways.

“The oil may have stopped flowing, but the spill still goes on down here every day,” said Lambert, owner and operator of Cajun Fishing Adventures, a sprawling lodge and charter business in Buras. “My fishing business is still down 50 to 60 percent, we’re still finding oil and tar balls on the beach and in the marsh, people still think the fish are polluted, and now we can’t find speckled trout in nearly the numbers we had before the spill. So don’t tell me the disaster is over. Maybe for BP it is. Maybe for the oil business people it is. But for me and other charter businesses, it’s never stopped.”

It is time, brown people, that we see how beautiful we are. How rich our culture is. It is time that we look at these tools that were put into our hands at birth, the master’s tools, and decide that they aren’t going to dismantle this house, this system. We have to go back to our roots. Re-discover our values. OUR values. Not the white man’s values. And if we can’t find answers…we need to create new ones. We need to create new solutions for this nation’s problems. Not rely on a constitution written by white men 200 something years ago. Not try to write policies and adhere to laws when that whole system needs to be toppled and recreated. Not try to fix a system that was doomed to fail due to the principles it was built upon. We need to create something new. We aren’t going to salvage this one- not with all the racism, classism, ableism, sexism…etc.